Dylan awoke with a groan. The walls of the clinic came into focus. Belatedly, he remembered what had happened. After Dr. Baughman had finished treating his wounds, he had woken Dylan up, at which point he had climbed back into his armor, and fallen asleep. It had been a few days since then, and his injuries were slowly healing. It was taking longer than he thought it would. Dr. Baughman had been helpful, although there wasn’t much he could do, any more. It was mostly up to Dylan, to heal on his own, now.
He felt a lot better than he had before, thankfully. He stood up, taking a glance around the room he was in. He had started sleeping in the back of the clinic, freeing up the treatment room that he had previously been occupying. He supposed that he should be going home soon. Dylan would be lucky if his mom hadn’t called the police already. She had seemed pretty distracted recently. He could probably just tell her that he’d been staying at a friend's house, or something. Kids his age did that, did they not?
Dylan took another look at his armor as he stood up. It was basically trashed. Dented, cut through, the motors damaged from overuse. If he wanted it to get back to working at full capacity, he’d need to go and repair it.
But Dylan wasn’t entirely certain that he wanted it up and running again. He’d been thinking about what had happened, a lot. While he felt that everybody was being unfair towards him (the only people he had killed had been criminals, and they were accidents), he had to admit that he rarely seemed to make things better.
But did that mean that he should give up? Shouldn’t the hero go against the odds? Should he not try, again and again, ignoring the naysayers, until his deeds spoke for himself? It seemed that was how every movie went, and there were countless examples of successful people who had been rejected at first, but succeeded through perseverance.
Dylan would have to think on it longer still, but he did believe that he had done more harm than good. He had stopped the robbery at the gas station. He had saved almost all of the robbers, and stopped Kasha.
He might have killed Dynamis in the process (it was hard to tell. The news simply said that he had been injured, following a battle with a villian, but they might be covering up his death until the cities primary protector came back), but really, the hero had brought that on himself. Who surprised people in the middle of rescuing hostages, and then got mad that those people tried to defend themselves?
Dylan found his vision narrowing, and could hear the beating of his heart in his ears. Taking deep breaths, he tried to calm himself down. It seemed like even thinking about that whole debacle was making him angry. He put it out of his mind, vowing to deal with it at a later date.
He sat in the back of the clinic for a little longer, thinking about what he was going to do. The room he sat in was mostly concrete. Shelves, stacked with boxes, many of which were empty, lined its walls. Nobody, sans Dr. Baughman, had come back here in the time that Dylan had stayed, although according to the Doctor, his daughter would usually go back there when she was helping with the clinic. She hadn’t shown up in a few days, apparently, not since Dylan had arrived. Apparently, something had upset her.
Dylan chuckled. She thought her life was upsetting? She should see what he was going through. Now, the next question that he had to ask himself was what he was going to do with his armor. It would probably be too dangerous for him to go back home wearing it. He supposed he could leave it here, but that presented its own problems. Mostly, how would he get out of the district? A 14 year old walking alone, in this part of town, might be ignored. But if somebody did decide to pick a fight with Dylan, while he was walking back, then he didn’t think he would be able to stop them. While he could have his drone accompany him, shadowing him from the sky, that would leave his suit exposed here. He didn’t think that Dr. Baughman would try anything, but people were unpredictable. Plus, there was always the chance one of Kasha’s men, or Kasha himself, would stumble upon the suit, and decide to appropriate it for themselves.
Dylan didn’t even know if anybody else could use the suit, but it was dangerous enough (and hard enough to replace), that he didn’t want to risk it. No, that plan was out.
Similarly, he couldn’t wear it back to his house. Before, he could get away with it. Now, with how wanted he seemed to be, somebody would surely follow him back. He might be able to lose them, if he ran fast enough, but that was still risky.
Dylan figured that the best plan would be to go to the edge of the bad sector of town, and, once there, find an abandoned building, or something similar, and hide the suit there, leaving his drone to watch over it.
That would mean he could access the suit without worrying about traversing through the lawless zone unprotected, but it would also mean that the police likely wouldn’t see him wearing it all around the parts of town that they actually bothered to keep an eye on.
With his mind made up, Dylan got up, stretching out. He was careful not to pull the stitches on his back out. His suit would probably make such a motion easy, even though they were almost fully healed.
He quickly peaked his head out, into the clinic proper, looking for Dr. Baughman. He probably should thank the man for taking such good care of him. However, the Doctor was nowhere to be seen. In fact, most of the lights were off. It was dark outside, as well, meaning that Dylan had a hard time seeing.
Just as he was about to walk out of the front door, he saw a flickering orange light, reflected in the glass of the doors. He turned, and was engulfed by a wave of fire.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Winnie had never thought that she’d become a super. No, that was something that happened to other people. She’d thought about what power she would get, if it did happen. Most people had. While many had their favorites, she always figured that, were she to become a super, she’d get some sort of healing power.
It only made sense, after all. Her father was a Doctor. She might as well have been, with how much she helped him. It would let her help more people, take away a lot of the stress in life. No need to worry so much about whether your patient could survive surgery, if you could just wave a hand and heal them.
So that was why, when she fled home, the night the armored villain appeared in her fathers clinic, she was surprised to see her hands alight in flame. It had startled her, causing her to fall backwards, and wave it around, hoping to extinguish the sudden blaze.
It didn’t go out, however, and her panic kept mounting. It took nearly a minute for her to realize that she barely felt the heat. No pain accompanied the blaze. The anger that she had felt so strongly slowly started to fade into the background, replaced by wonder.
The flame slowly started to fade, its flames dimming, movement slowing. It eventually pittered out, the light vanishing entirely.
The sense of wonder didn’t go with it, however. Winnie continued to stare at her hand. She wasn’t sure what had just happened. Was her hand really on fire? Or was she just losing her mind, the stress catching up to her. She didn’t know.
As she tried to figure out what had just happened, a wave of exhaustion swept over her, and Winnie barely managed to stagger into her room, collapsing onto her bed, before she passed out, into a deep, dreamless slumber.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
When she awoke, the events of last night felt like a dream. Did a wanted villain really come into their clinic, bash a gun out of her fathers hand? Had her hand actually produced fire? As she started to wake up more and more, however, she became increasingly certain that, at the very least, the villain on the news had come into the clinic. Her memory of the event sharpened, and she found herself remembering the fear, and then the anger.
Winnie was broken out of her dark recollection by the scent of smoke. Where was it coming from? She walked into the kitchen to check. Maybe her father had burned something, making breakfast? Hopefully, it was that. Otherwise, she’d have to check to see if the house was on fire.
Winnie found the kitchen empty. In fact, judging by the absence of her fathers shoes at the door, he was already gone.
That meant that the next 15 minutes saw Winnie checking around the house, looking for what had produced the smoke. She found nothing. No candles burning, no singing, no sparking wires ( as far as she could tell). Nothing. Nothing that could even come close to producing such a smell.
That only left one option. Had she caused it? Walking back into her bedroom, Whitney unrumpled her sheets, checking it over. She found dark marks, singe marks, in the shape of hands, pressed into her sheets.
Oh. So Winnie either did have powers, or was actively losing her mind. That was great. And her power seemed like a lot of trouble. Did she just randomly burst into flame? That seemed like it would, at least a little, completely ruin her life. Well, that was utter shit.
Winnie would probably prefer to just be mentally unwell. She could probably recover from that. They had medication for conditions like that. And even if she couldn’t, well, then maybe that would still be preferable to being an uncontrollable human torch.
She still had one hope left. She could try to see if she could control this power. At the very least, it could let her live a normal life.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Winnie found herself in her backyard, 5 minutes later. It was a small, fenced in area, half concrete, half dead grass. She’d have to stay away from the grass part. It would be far too easy to create an uncontrollable blaze, should even a few sparks hit it.
She had come prepared. Winnie had taken the liberty of removing the fire extinguisher from the kitchen, and placing it on the ground beside her. She also had the garden hose hooked up. Hopefully, these two things would be enough to deal with any fire that might pop up due to her experimentation. Fingers crossed.
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Now that the preparation was out of the way, however, Winnie didn’t know what to do. How would one go about finding out how to use their powers? It seemed like it came naturally for some. Perhaps if she’d had a mentor, somebody else who’d gone through a similar process of self discovery, it’d be easier. They might not be able to tell her what she needed to do, exactly, but they could certainly give her advice, to try and guide her through the whole process.
But Winnie didn’t have any of that. Nope. She’d just have to work it out herself. It’d be what it’d be. She stared down at her hands, searchingly. She tried to picture fire, in her mind, rising up from her fingers, engulfing her hands, the same way it had the night before. Nothing.
Next, Winnie tried thrusting them out, pushing them forwards, trying to imagine the feeling of pushing her mind through her arms. That one didn’t work, either. It might have been for the best. Shooting a huge jet of fire out of her hand would have been problematic.
She spent the next hour or so trying so many different things. She tried to command it with her mind, tried talking out loud. Tried to run, even tried pleading with her hands. No dice.
No matter what she did, nothing seemed to work. If her powers were really uncontrollable, well, she could say hello to a lifetime of being buried in some flame retardant cell, deep in a government facility. It was what happened to all of the people with dangerous powers that they couldn’t control. LIke that guy her father talked about sometimes, the one with radiation powers. He had been a hero, until they found out that simply being near him 10xed your cancer risk. Then they stuck him in a bunker, deep below the earth.
Winnie tried to look on the bright side of it. At least she wasn’t some sort of mutant looking fish freak. She could be a normal person, just one who went ablaze occasionally.
She signed, and then turned around, dejected and ready to head back inside, precautionary items forgotten. There wasn’t much else she could try. Winnie supposed she could come back out, keep trying each day. If she ended up succeeding, then that would be great. If not, it would only be a matter of time until somebody found out that she had a dangerous, uncontrollable power, and locked her up because of it. That put her on some sort of a deadline, at least.
Starting at her reflection in the door, Winnie realized just how small, how powerless she looked, at that moment. She had always thought of herself as somewhat on top of it, as a go-getter, at least as much as she could have been. She was a responsible child. Winnie felt that people, adults, even, listened to her, that she could cause change, that she had some sort of control.
Seeing that villain, standing, armored and menacing in the clinic doorway, had torn that illusion away from her. She was just a powerless little girl. Even her father, with a gun, had been unable to do anything. The weapon was swatted out of his hand so quickly that she didn’t even really see it happening, only the result.
Winnie felt that newly familiar anger start to rise within her. It was so unfair. How some people were born different, how they could just come and take, and take, and take, and there was nothing that good people could do about it, nothing they could do except cry for help.
Winnie bet that the villain didn’t know what it was like to struggle. What it was like to live in a rough neighborhood, to watch your father have to fight to protect you. To have to try and save people, only to see their lives slipping away. Hell, that dumbass tin man had probably just woken up, with his powers fully functional, ready to go, and decided to start terrorizing people.
Winnie felt a deeper flash of rage, then, that that scumbag could have it so easy, while she was out her, trying to control something that seemed uncontrollable, where one wrong move could kill somebody, and get her killed in return.
As she reached out for the handle of her back door, Winnie noticed that her hand was glowing, heat coming off of it in waves. She quickly drew her hand away from the door, afraid of damaging it.
Hmm. So that's how it worked? It fed off of her anger, it seemed. Winnie frowned. That was better than not knowing when she would catch on fire, but it still seemed pretty inconvenient.
But with knowledge, came a new found resolve. She might not be a naturally talented person, like that bastard villain. But she was the hardest working person she knew. She would work until she was strong enough to defeat him. Winnie smiled. She liked that plan. She’d show that arrogant thug who was boss, and then hand him over to the police, let him face justice for his crimes.
She just had to get her abilities down. And then, well, it would be time for her to step up.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Over the next few days, Winnie practiced her powers in the backyard, when her father wasn’t home. It wasn’t particularly hard to avoid him. He spent so long at the clinic she found plenty of time to practice, although she did occasionally have to bite back her frustration when he arrived home earlier than expected.
The fact that she had to be angry to use her powers didn’t help. Instead of being able to dutifully extinguish her flames, Winnie found that interruptions made them flare higher. She would feel anger at being interrupted, on top of the anger she already felt. In the moment, it felt like her father was doing his best to crush her dreams of finally being able to make a difference in the world, to try and fight back against everything that had been terrorizing her all of her life, the difficulties and burdens that had pressed down on her.
Intellectually, she knew that it wasn’t right to feel that way. Her father wasn’t doing it on purpose. He didn’t even know she had powers, and, if she were being honest, the burdens that he faced were harsher than the ones that she had to contend with. They had broken him, after all.
But knowing that she shouldn’t be mad at her father, and actually being not mad at her father were two different things. It was hard to be level headed when you were fueling yourself with anger, and anger was really all that was keeping Winnie going right now. If she lost that, she’d be left with only apathy, a resigned acceptance of the status quo. She refused to let that happen.
Her training, while slow at first, did start bearing fruit quicker than she initially expected it would. It took her a full day of practice, but she was eventually able to consistently summon her flames. She was still working on modulating them, as it was hard to control their size. It was partially based on the intensity of the emotion she was feeling, but she could modify it somewhat, based on her will.
Her flames were obviously not ordinary either. Winnie hadn’t noticed it the first few times she summoned them, too shocked to observe carefully, but she found that they glowed a deeply unnatural red color, a hue that was, in a sense, darker than a normal flame, yet at the same time more vibrant. It was almost confusing to look at, and Winnie was almost certain that it defied how brightness and color interacted normally.
But she supposed that it was par for the course with super powers. You couldn’t expect them to be ordinary. No, many of them took on bizarre forms, and even similar powers could vary greatly. The fact that her fire was unnatural was nothing to be surprised at.
Once Winnie could exert a decent amount of control over her flames, she moved on to trying to make them more useful. While a person certainly wouldn’t want to be touched by someone whose hands were burning, all they’d have to do to avoid it was back away faster than she approached them. Not exactly the most reliable weapon. Plus, if they had any way to attack her from range, she had almost no way to defend herself. While Winnie might be able to burn most things launched at her into slag, provided that she could actually intercept them with her hands, that slag would still be flying right at her, and Winnie had no doubt that it would be both horribly damaging and painful.
Experimenting with making her flames ranged was tricky. It didn’t come naturally. Winnie found no luck with simply willing the fire to go to a location. Verbal commands were still out, which Winnie found herself strangely thankful for. She thought that it would be awfully embarrassing to have to yell at her powers mid battle.
Eventually, she discovered that the trick was to actually get mad at whatever she was trying to target. It was a difficult process, at first, partially because she didn’t really have anything to target. Eventually, she settled on tossing rocks into the air, and trying to get angry at them.
When it worked, the fire would almost gravitate towards the stones. When it subsided, the rocks would fall towards the ground, a burning, cherry red color. One had accidentally fallen in the grass once, and Winnie had to scramble for the fire extinguisher to put out the small blaze that occurred. She was much more careful with where she tossed them after that.
Now, there were some problems with this method. For starters, it used the fire she generated, which meant that, once projected from her hands, she’d lose access to it. This might be less of a problem if she were able to make a bigger blaze, but as it stood now, Winnie was stuck with shooting small balls of fire.
She figured that there would be time to work on it later, however. For now, she’d practice what she could. Winnie knew that she was on a deadline, of some sort. According to her father, the villain was there to be treated for some pretty severe injuries that he’d gained whilst fighting Dynamis. Injuries that would take months for a normal person to recover from, even with medical assistance.
But because he was a super, she probably only had a few more days until he left the clinic. He wouldn’t stick around until he was fully healed, most likely. Staying in one place, especially one as public as their little doctors office, was a bad idea for a highly wanted villain. It was no secret lair, after all.
This time limit gave Winnie a sense of urgency. She needed to master her powers, fast. Faster than she had heard of anybody else doing it before. Her hours of practice were long, but she did eventually find herself feeling ready. She felt stronger than she had before, more capable, more confident.
This, Winnie felt, was a stronger confidence. It was born out of the knowledge that she could protect herself. That she was no longer just a little girl, one who had to bend to the whims of anybody around her.
That night, she could barely sleep, tossing and turning in her bed. Winnie had decided that tomorrow was the day that she would enact justice. No more waiting around, hoping things got better. Tomorrow, she would take action.
—----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Winnie awoke when the sun rose, and got to preparing. She would do what she could to make this go as smoothly as possible.
First off, her outfit for the day. Winnie wasn’t normally a fashionable dresser, preferring her outfits to be a bit more practical, and she went all in on that today. She wore two pairs of jeans, the thickest ones she owned. They would restrict her mobility slightly, but hopefully they would offer some protection. She also brought the thickest sweater she owned. It would probably still hurt to be hit, but at least she’d be as protected as possible. She also grabbed her bike helmet, just in case.
Next, she grabbed the fire extinguisher, and sat at the door. How did she want this to play out? What would be the best way to go about defeating a villain? Eventually, Winnie developed a plan, one that she felt would maximize her chances of success.
That being done, she set out from her house, towards the clinic. The sun was already setting by the time she left. Good. That would make her plan more effective. When she arrived at the clinic, she saw her father packing up his car.
He turned to look at her unusual getup, one eyebrow quirked.
“Wow, aren’t you ‘dressed up’ today? Our guest is asleep in the backroom. Try not to wake him up.”
Winnie nodded, and forced a smile onto her face. Her father needed to see that she was fine. If he knew what she was about to do, he’d probably try to stop her. She couldn’t have him getting in the way. He would only serve to ensure that the criminal they’d been forced to harbor escaped justice, and his presence would only put himself in danger.
Winnie walked into the clinic, and sat down, watching her father get in the car. Once he had driven off, she started enacting her plan. Winnie went around, and turned off all of the lights, bathing the clinic in darkness. Then, she walked into one of the treatment rooms, closing the door behind her. And then, it was time to wait.
After what seemed like an eternity, Winnie heard heavy footsteps walk down the hall, past the room she was hiding in. She waited a few more breaths, before getting up and quietly opening the door.
There was a small amount of light coming in from outside the clinic, and in that light, Winnie saw the silhouette of her target. She felt a smile creeping over her face. And then Winnie Blazed.